Do you remember how to spell all of those words you let the spellcheck catch? Do you remember what fraction of a teaspoon of salt goes into that one recipe, or would you look at the list of ingredients to be sure? Do you remember what kinds of plastic they recycle in your neighborhood, or do you delegate that task to a list attached with a magnet to the fridge?
I don't know if this says anything important or relevant, but I remember nearly all of these things. Spelling, in my first language of English, anyway, is effortless for me. I always end up memorizing things like recipes because, well, I use them. And hate having to take time to look it up, so I deliberately try to learn "shortcuts", for example "all cookie recipes have 1 teaspoon baking soda". I have occasionally kept calendars, and it was a big stress reliever, but it was also time consuming and mostly unnecessary–I don't forget that I got called in for a random weeknight shift at the hospital, or that I have an appointment on X day.
I think this is secondary to two factors. A) I have a pretty encyclopedic memory. I read literally thousands of books as a child, and to this day I can dredge up a significant fraction of the major plot of almost any of them, and actual quotes if I read them more than once. To me this is normal, but my mom is surprised when I remember things like that, so I guess it's uncommon. B) I don't like wasting time, and having to look stuff up that's easy to remember, for me, and that I use frequently feels like wasting time.
I do tend to store the minimum. For example, once I find out the due date for a school project, I'm pretty unlikely to forget the date and have to look it up, but that doesn't mean I'll bother to learn anything about the content of the project until I plan on starting it, and finishing it shortly thereafter.
Throughout nursing school, I've often "known" things in the sense of "I would have a 100% grasp of it quite easily with 2 minutes of looking stuff up." This is useful in areas like pharmacology, where the underlying structure (drug classes and mechanisms of action) is fairly logical and interesting, and thus easy to remember, but the surface structure (generic and commercial names and the side effects that aren't an example of the drug being 'too effective') is ridiculously difficult to memorize. That being said, my non-looking-up grasp is about 90%–enough to get really good grades in theory classes without being able to look stuff up on the spot, but not enough to feel comfortable actually treating patients without re-looking it up.
I've also noticed that I "purge" my autobiographical memory–as if I'm making more space for data that I find interesting. I'm very good at staying on top of day-to-day life and remembering due dates and work shifts and stuff, but I'm hard pressed to think of more than ten specific episodes that I remember from elementary school. I know the general 'story' of my childhood but I don't bother to retain the details–which means that I often don't understand my younger self's thoughts and decisions very well.
How many of the things you "know" do you have memorized?
Do you remember how to spell all of those words you let the spellcheck catch? Do you remember what fraction of a teaspoon of salt goes into that one recipe, or would you look at the list of ingredients to be sure? Do you remember what kinds of plastic they recycle in your neighborhood, or do you delegate that task to a list attached with a magnet to the fridge?
If I asked you what day of the month it is today, would you know, or would you look at your watch/computer clock/the posting date of this post?
Before I lost my Palm Pilot, I called it my "external brain". It didn't really fit the description; with no Internet access, it mostly held my contact list, class schedule, and grocery list. And a knockoff of Minesweeper. Still, in a real enough sense, it remembered things for me.The vast arena of knowledge at our fingertips in the era of constant computing has, ironically, brought it farther away. It seems nearer: after all, now, if you are curious about Zanzibar, Wikipedia is a few keystrokes away. Before the Internet, you'd probably have been looking at a trip to the library and a while wrestling with the card catalog; and that would be if you lived in an affluent, literate society. If you didn't, good luck knowing Zanzibar exists in the first place!
But if you were an illiterate random peasant farmer in some historical venue, and you needed to know the growing season of taro or barley or insert-your-favorite-staple-crop-here, Wikipedia would have been superfluous: you would already know it. It would be unlikely that you would find a song lyrics website of any use, because all of the songs you'd care about would be ones you really knew, in the sense of having heard them sung by real people who could clarify the words on request, as opposed to the "I think I heard half of this on the radio at the dentist's office last month" sense.
Everything you would need to know would be important enough to warrant - and keep - a spot in your memory.
So in a sense, propositional knowledge is being gradually supplanted by the procedural. You need only know how to find information, to be able to use it after a trivial delay. This requires some snippet of propositional data - to find a song lyric, you need a long enough string that you won't turn up 99% noise when you try to Google it! - but mostly, it's a skill, not a fact, that you need to act like you knew the fact.
It's not clear to me whether this means that we should be alarmed and seek to hone our factual memories... or whether we should devote our attention to honing our Google-fu, as our minds gradually become server-side operations.